"I cling, imploring, to your knees; Oh, cruel goddess, turn to me! One kiss the burning pain will ease-- Thy lips give Immortality!" The Elegiac [mo-un-fu] is, perhaps, the most cultured among the refined poets. The most distinguished of the English living writers of verse is very elegant in this form. He cannot emancipate himself from the habits of his people--for the wretched he can find no solace but in the Superstitions of the Christ-god worship. He demands a _Sacrifice_ quite inhuman, when he suggests the only remedy for human grief. Possibly, he finds in this, a meaning of a different kind from what the language (used in the Superstition) itself implies. He may see a meaning common to all sorrowful and thoughtful men--_Self-Sacrifice_, demanded by the highest perception of justice, and, therefore, inevitable. In this department some of the minor poets sing very sweetly, tenderly--with a nice refinement. Generally, however, there is a sort of despair wailing in an under-tone of pathos. It would seem to arise from the gloomy spirit of the Barbarian nature, intensified by the terrible Superstition. The comic poets are coarse, trivial, and not much esteemed. There is humour, but it is of the barbarous and unclean. It is frequently strangely fantastic, and delights in laughing at the terrific in the "_Sacred Writings_," or at the Priests, in a covert manner; often in _travesties_ of the prayers, _rites_, and other _holy_ things, which no one would dare openly to ridicule. Poetry is not much read, unless by young girls and lads, who, in the season of the sentiments, find food to feed their desires, or to print their tender epistles and speeches, in the Sentimental Authors. Very rarely is there anything striking or true; and the mass of Verses, after receiving the _paid-for_ attention of the daily writers, sleep a sleep of oblivion. The Prose writings are innumerable--largely, however, mere _re-hashes_ [mi-pi-stu] of existing works. It is a trade to make these new forms of old books--cutting down, working over, and revising. History, accounts of bloody fights, forays, commotions, massacres, and burnings, now by one Christ-god tribe and now by another; Biography, Travels, Lives of _Great men_ (never heard of out of some Barbarian tribe); these are many, and read by the _Literati_. A few books, rarely read, devoted to _Science_ and to _Art_, are printed, commonly to the ruin of the printers.